


take a drag, let it go

by oisugasuga



Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: Angst, M/M, Post-Break Up
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-03
Updated: 2019-07-05
Packaged: 2020-04-07 09:10:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,261
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19081963
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/oisugasuga/pseuds/oisugasuga
Summary: So Iwaizumi spiraled back down. He spiraled down and around and down some more until he reached his tiny, shitty apartment and wedged his hollow body between his futon and heavy quilted cover despite the sweat sticking his hair to the nape of his neck, trickling down the broken and cracked curve of his spine to pool salty at the dip of his back.He sank himself and closed his eyes and let the monotonous bark of the dog next door pound into his head over and over and over again.After all… it was better than remembering cigarette smoke, even if he could smell it on his pillowcase.





	1. Chapter 1

It was the gray memory of cigarette smoke lingering on the air, curling and twisting. Cigarette smoke and the pinch of pale fingers, bitten-down nails. The distant rumble of thunder.

 

Three fingers, cradling the roll between them, supporting it, watching it flicker and burn and chip and flutter away… little pieces of paper spiraling down to cracked concrete. Three fingers supporting a simple roll of paper, raising it to pouted lips, to slide the end over the edge of a pink tongue, inhale. 

 

Exhale.

 

_Breathe out_ , Iwaizumi’s mind reminded him. _Breathe. Please._

 

So he entertained himself. Appeased himself. Humored himself, maybe. He breathed. 

 

Inhale.

 

Exhale.

 

The breath cut loose from his lungs like a bird just learning to fly — unsteady wings, hollow bones. Flapping awkwardly up his throat until the edges of his vision stopped blurring and melting in the muggy summer night.

 

Cigarette smoke. He could still smell it when he sucked another ragged breath in.

 

_Breathe in. Out. Again._

 

Eventually the smell faded into everything else. The acridity softened and eased — into the creaky, cold ache of sitting on the concrete roof for too long, into the whiny rumble of the city unfurled before Iwaizumi and the staleness of beer on his breath — and Iwaizumi found himself tired instead of tense… crumpled instead of drawn tight like the string on his niece’s kite last week at her birthday party.

 

Tokyo was no longer a minefield of memories and what if’s… the sharp, jagged skyline no longer held if only’s or the haunting echo of a voice caressing Iwaizumi’s ears from the labyrinth of streets below — a beast lying in wait to swell up and clamp its teeth around Iwaizumi’s middle.

 

All he truly saw as he stood up and shoved his hands down into his pockets — shuffled for the stairwell with the jammed roof door and dead bugs cluttering up the corners, their wings stopped beating long ago — was how exhausted Tokyo looked.

 

Thunder rumbled closer. The sun dared to try to rise under the weight of the clouds as Iwaizumi shoved that door open and stepped into cranky air conditioning, the faint smell of cat piss… the sunlight was watery and weak. It pushed its way up and in the blink of an eye the city was a tired, smudged, desperate mess of briefcases and the screech of train wheels on metal, monotone voices sticky and staticky, crackling over loudspeakers. Iwaizumi watched it happen with bones that felt as hollow as his chest cavity, watched his neighbors drag their arthritic limbs out onto the street to start the day.

 

He should’ve been joining them. He should’ve been changing out of these sweatpants — the ones with the hole in the right ankle — and brushing the stale beer from his tongue, combing his hair, throwing out the rotting food sitting on his countertop in haphazard piles next to empty tin bottles with cheerful logos sprawled around their circumferences, piled-up newspapers, dirty clothes and textbooks thrown face-down, their spines cracked and broken, pages bent and soaking in spilled alcohol…

 

… but it had been a long night. A longer week.

 

So Iwaizumi spiraled back down. He spiraled down and around and down some more until he reached his tiny, shitty apartment and wedged his hollow body between his futon and heavy quilted cover despite the sweat sticking his hair to the nape of his neck, trickling down the broken and cracked curve of his spine to pool salty at the dip of his back. 

 

He sank himself and closed his eyes and let the monotonous bark of the dog next door pound into his head over and over and over again.

 

After all… it was better than remembering cigarette smoke, even if he could smell it on his pillowcase. 

 

Cigarette smoke and cologne. Dark brown eyes, slanted towards Iwaizumi, cracked between thick, feathery lines of ink-black eyelashes and smudged under with plum, violet, every shade of purple Iwaizumi had ever tried to think of. Right side of the sink. Right side of the bed… the dip in the futon where a body once slept, fucked, cried, fingertips pushing at muscle and bone and skin bruised pink with overwork and stubbornness, pride, passion… and Iwaizumi’s hands joining to help with a right knee. A full mouth, tilted into a delicious smirk and then easing into - soft. Soft skin, soft hair, soft lips and the drag of teeth and the claw of nails and three, pale, bitten-down fingertips, clutching a roll of paper. Supporting it. Holding it. Keeping it close.

 

Until the cigarette crumbled to smoke and ash and the little bits of paper caught on the rumble of thunder and a hollow breath of wind and were sucked away and down, spiraling until they hit cracked concrete and joined the desperate, thoughtless, exhausted crowds of the city.

 

Iwaizumi squeezed his eyes shut…

 

… and he tried to remember what it felt like to be held at all.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> uh. i honestly just wanted to write something short so i did this? i may do a pt. 2 depending on the feedback this gets... plus i hate making my iwaoi unhappy :/
> 
> blog --> [heyo](https://oisugasuga.tumblr.com/)


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> as promised, a little bit of closure for iwaoi ヾ(≧ー≦)ゞ
> 
> i would possibly do a pt. 3 but it's time to dedicate some time to my novel so... i did really enjoy experimenting with a more abstract style with this so i'm sure i'll return to it with future fics. 
> 
> blog --> [hereeeeeeeee](https://oisugasuga.tumblr.com/)

Oikawa Tooru came back on the day the dog stopped barking.

 

The dog stopped barking and the silence counted out the days since the Moment. Three weeks and a blank phone, dirty dishes, the fly buzzing in the windowsill until day five — falling silent, dead. Twenty-one days and a broken air conditioning unit, mail stacking up on the floor, beer bottles under Iwaizumi’s feet when he woke, bleary-eyed and disoriented.

 

Five-hundred and four hours… and the smell of cigarette smoke still lingered like a phantom limb. 

 

Iwaizumi didn’t notice at first. The silence. The time.

 

He was a man made of nothing more but five o’clock shadow and all he knew was the rising and setting of the sun.

 

The shower was lukewarm when he turned it on with fumbling, sticky fingers. The tile was gritty and the bar of soap between Iwaizumi’s fingertips was a sliver, a crescent moon, a ghost of a thing, slipping between his palms until he gave up and threw it — hard, fast, the bar cracking in half against the opposite wall.

 

The time in the bathwater afterwards was long and meaningless. Iwaizumi counted time in the rise and fall of his bare chest. He waited until his skin was wrinkly and thin, stretched too tight — _That’s too tight, Uncle! It’s gonna fall! Here, give me, I can do it. I’m nine now, ya know?_ — like the string on a kite, floating in the wind, anchoring that thin, fragile candy-colored fabric down… but for how long?

 

How long until that string snapped? Too tight, too rigid. Too long.

 

_Iwa-chann, that’s too tight. You’re wrapping it too tight. Here, give me. I’m capable, ya know? I can wrap my own knee._

 

The sweat mingled with the bathwater, salty. The tears didn’t. They stayed still, at attention, soldiers held back with a firmly set jaw and fingers digging lavender bruises into tensed thighs. 

 

Iwaizumi stared down into the water and he watched the clutch and flex of his fingers and he saw so many different shades of purple… too many to count. Too many to remember, under eyelids fluttering with exhaustion, eyes trained on a screen, fingertips resting on a knee blurred violet with ignorance, stupidity, courage.

 

Sweat was running down Iwaizumi’s neck by the time he pulled on clothes. 

 

New clothes. After all, he had showered… and the old ones were starting to smell. The fridge opened. Bright, harsh lights. Rotting food. A new fly, wings unsticking to hover in front of Iwaizumi’s damp face until he waved it away with an impatient flick.

 

The door shut again. The apartment fell back into darkness but sunlight took the place of watery fluorescents, crinkled and spat its way over the floor, sprays of it coming through the tightly-shut blinds. It was stronger today.

 

The rain had passed.

 

Iwaizumi’s fingers itched. 

 

Here, in the gloom with sunbursts lighting up corners his eyes strayed away from (that couch, those books, a stain of red wine on the hardwood because that night they had had too much, too dizzy, spilled in laughter before it had turned into a half-hearted reprimand, a responding pout that melted into dark eyes and long, pale limbs crawling over the woodgrain and then the hitch of a breath, the curl of fingers in waistbands and a spill left forgotten for better things), Iwaizumi itched. 

 

Itched for a cold, sweating bottle between his fingertips. For the springs of a futon digging into the hard, tensed edges of his thoracic, lumbar curve… easing them out, letting him rest, holding him together.

 

He itched so that he wouldn’t have to scratch.

 

Forever scratching at the images behind his eyes with the bitten-down tip of a pen, ink staining his teeth, tongue, throat, sticky, bitter. Forever scratching away at a face, the soft, relaxed curve of a spine pressed to his chest, the pattern of laced fingers and a tongue against his ear, damp, hot, thighs under his fingers, slender calves and a laugh that lit up the room like sunbursts.

 

Iwaizumi squeezed the blinds shut tighter and ignored the burn of the tight stretch of the string against his fingertips.

 

Finally, it was dark enough.

 

——-

 

The work was distracting. Static over a tv. The hum of someone waiting on the phone. A sudden flurry of birds from trees, blocking out the sun for just a moment.

 

Wipe up the beer stains. Change the sheets. Toss the food. 

 

Iwaizumi followed robotically, rhythmically. All the while bumping into the fly until he opened the front door in an act of mercy, letting it flit free. 

 

"Ah," came the voice before he could close himself away again. "Hajime."

 

Paper-thin. Smelled like cough drops and the incense she burned every morning — for her husband, five years gone, photograph in his place and an ache in Iwaizumi’s chest whenever he watched her shuffle up the stairs with a silvery head bowed, shoulders curved, broken wings, paper-thin hands and blue veins, shuffling past the bugs piled in the corners with their own broken gleam — and Iwaizumi had to look up.

 

"Takahashi-san," he greeted. His tongue curled firm and warm around the syllables, genuine. She was a good person, a good neighbor — grandmotherly and maternal in a way that made Iwaizumi clutch at his memorabilia from home and then dial his parents’ house number the next night.

 

His mouth ached but he managed a smile. Small. Weak, maybe… but enough that his neighbor wouldn’t notice past the milkiness spread sticky and thick over her irises. Cataracts. 

 

_I’m gonna lend her some money. No, no, Iwa-chan, it’s not gonna make her uncomfortable. I’ll just drop it off in her mailbox. An anonymous gift._

 

Iwaizumi shook, trembled, held very, very still. Waited. 

 

The memory passed. The voice left. 

 

Iwaizumi greeted his neighbor politely, the way he had been taught. _Go on, Hajime-kun. Tell them your full name. Ah, he’s shy. Come on, Mommy’s right here._

 

He saw himself as a child in the way a profile might’ve been filed in a station — 12 years of age, 147.2 centimeters ( _Don’t worry, Iwa-channn, you’ll grow and be tall like me… maybe if you stopped frowning so much. I think it makes your head too heavy - ouch!_ ), black hair, green eyes, male, band-aids on both knees, 2.54 centimeters of dirt under the fingernails, permanent scowl, and a brown-haired accomplice *See page 11

 

In the moment that Takahashi-san blinked at him — heavy, labored, squinting to see in the dimly-lit, narrow hall — Iwaizumi saw himself bend a little at the waist in his head, just a kid mumbling out his full name to the scary, too-tall adults… and he wondered if that feeling ever really left anyone.

 

Inadequacy. 

 

The word dredged up that voice again, unbidden. Unstoppable, no matter how stationary Iwaizumi held himself this time.

 

_What’re you afraid of, Hajime? Oh, wait! Remember when you were afraid of never getting any taller? That fear actually came true, didn’t it? I’m kidding, kidding, don’t hit me!_

 

A pause, a break in the record playing time backwards in Iwaizumi’s head. A lull — static, the cassette tape stumbling — and then a sigh, damp and warm and sticky on Iwaizumi’s neck but fake, a memory, a ghost’s touch, hollow and faint and conjured up by electric shocks between nerve endings… a magic trick.

 

Then… _What are you truly afraid of?_

 

Serious. Reluctant. (After all, _he_ had never been good at this kind of stuff. Even as _he_ had laid bare against Iwaizumi’s shoulder — cradled close, supported, clothes strewn on the floor — Iwaizumi had known that. Still he had held too tight. Too tight. _That’s too tight, Uncle! It’s gonna fall!_ ) 

 

It had been everything Iwaizumi would expect of such a question passing from between those lips. Soft and wet and so quiet the words were only stamped into existence by the shuddery exhale they produced against cooling skin.

 

Only now… only now as Takahashi-san pushed a plastic box of packed food into his hands, shuffling in and back out across her doorstep, Iwaizumi knew he had lied.

 

_Inadequacy_ , he had answered. 

 

Maybe he had been thinking of a bow, thirty degrees, say your full name, nothing to be scared of, Mommy’s here… or maybe it had been the stick of sweat from the man wrapped around him that had influenced the answer, salt on his tongue. The arch and bend of a knee hidden by the blankets on a thin futon. The memory of one final point and the deafening silence and the burn of tears behind his eyes, the cold metal of the locker room against his fist, the weight of a palm slamming into his shoulder from behind like it had been meant to knock the pain, the disbelief, the blame from him in one, single motion.

 

Now… now Iwaizumi thought, he would answer loss.

 

Inadequacy meant there was a next time. A new chance. A new game and a new hope.

 

Loss, he thought as he ached and watched Takahashi-san disappear back into her apartment (made for two, occupied by one), was far worse. 

 

——-

 

Dusk had fallen. Only then… only then did Iwaizumi notice it.

 

Quiet.

 

As silent as this corner of the city could be — the thick rumble of traffic, slamming doors and the crackly voice of fluorescent lights about to flicker out and that damned incessant _barking_ …

 

Only.

 

Only the barking had stopped.

 

Iwaizumi paused with the can (he deserved a reward, didn’t he? For the ache in his back and the gleam of his newly-wiped floor) halfway to his lips. He listened.

 

No yipping. No barking or growling or the scuffle of paws and nails against the chipped, peeling door to the right of his own in the hall. No Takahashi-san banging her cane against the wall to get it to stop or the muffled curses of others grumbling through the paper-thin walls.

 

Iwaizumi tipped the can back the rest of the way. He shrugged, turned back to his dinner.

 

Some little piece of him — in the back and pressed up to the curve of his spine — hoped the dog hadn’t died… no matter how annoying.

 

Another swig of beer. 

 

It’d probably start up again — early in the morning or right after Iwaizumi washed his bowl and curled up on his futon to rest for tomorrow’s work day. It’d start up again. Any time now. Right when Iwaizumi was least expec-

 

The knock on the door felt like a limb gone numb in sleep. Thick and distant. Heavy.

 

Iwaizumi didn’t get up at first. He couldn’t be sure. Had the knock been Takahashi-san after all? But…

 

There was no dog, still. Only silence. It strung out like a kite floating up in the clouds, away from it all — the thick rumble of traffic, slamming doors and the crackly voice of fluorescent lights about to flicker out… held down only by a hand on a string and five fingers curled tightly until they were too much, too tight, and the storm clouds stole the kite away, out of view, fingers still holding, holding, grasping, too ti-

 

Another knock and there was no mistaking it this time… it was on Iwaizumi’s own front door. A simple rap, two knuckles against the paint.

 

Iwaizumi got to his feet. Confusion bit into the steadiness Iwaizumi had carefully built up over the evening — slow and methodical, wiping and mopping and bathing once more until his hair dripped down onto a fresh t-shirt and his hands didn’t shake while he popped the lid off of his Asahi Super Dry.

 

Options filtered through his head while he shuffled over to the genkan. Takahashi-san, most likely. Or the owner of the dog, a college student who he rarely saw besides the flash of shoelaces, the bright pink of a bra strap and six-packs sometimes clutched between fingernails chipped with black paint. Maybe the dog had run away…

 

Iwaizumi pulled the door open and -

 

\- and maybe he should’ve known.

 

Maybe he should’ve known it’d be him. Maybe. Probably. _Surely_ he would’ve guessed before this moment, before the door swung open and revealed a new file to add to Iwaizumi’s head, a new report coming in like the words had been typed into the whites of his eyes to sink farther back to stay burned forever.

 

27 years of age, 184.3 centimeters, brown hair, brown eyes, weeks of sleepless nights stamped under both eyes, white tape around right knee, yellowing bruise on left shin, and the sharp smell of alcohol *See page 12 for charges on public disturbance

 

Maybe Iwaizumi should’ve known… but the alcohol — vodka, he knew already — wasn’t enough to cover the _newness_ — a new smell (like mint gum) and longer hair (hanging into those long, long lashes) and a less-ness to sharp shoulders and bony wrists and -

 

"Hajime."

 

Iwaizumi didn’t have time to feel sick to his stomach at the push of Oikawa’s collarbones against his skin — bruising and painful, stretching thin until Iwaizumi was sure it’d split and open and blood would -

 

That thinness careened into him — off-balance and warm, sticky and humid and _God_ , Iwaizumi’s throat convulsed on a sob that was too loud in the narrowness of the walls because even though there was new, there was so much more memory, familiarity, a knowing that came from his soul and the horrible, lovely ache of coming home, fitting together, crashing through all of the shock/hurt/pain/disbelief/fear.

 

He caught him. 

 

Iwaizumi’s arms moved with muscle memory, adjusting perfectly to catch and hold and it was like a dream above it all… like a candy-colored piece of fabric had fluttered down from the sky towards his reaching, desperate hands…

 

… and as he documented the same warmth on his own cheeks drip and slither down the side of his neck from brown eyes, black lashes, _Tooru_ — as he held and pulled and tugged, as tight as he could until they were a crumple of limbs on hardwood floors, tight, tighter, _Don’t let go, Hajime. Don’t, please, not this time. I won’t disappear, I won’t go, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, sorry sorry sorry, don’t let me go_ — Iwaizumi thought he felt it, light and fragile and a wisp like burnt paper fluttering through rain-soaked air as the skies cleared above.

 

He felt it again and Oikawa must have too because he caught his breath in the crook of Iwaizumi’s neck and he pushed as Iwaizumi pulled, an ebb and flow, give and take, balance and a new chance and _finally_ …

 

… finally, Iwaizumi felt the touch of a kite’s string and the pull of it between his fingers again.


End file.
